Do I need a booking system if most of my pub trade is walk-ins?

That depends on whether the walk-ins are the problem or the point. If your dining tables fill on the day and nobody waits long, a booking system mainly buys you the ability to plan a kitchen order. If people are being turned away at the door on a Saturday, or standing at the bar hoping a table frees up, the walk-in queue on Professional and above is the part that pays: diners scan a QR code to join the queue themselves, drink while they wait, and get a text when the table is ready. That is a pub problem more than a restaurant one, because in a pub the waiting area sells beer.

Can I take bookings for the restaurant side without booking out the whole pub?

Yes. Capacity in Seatly is the tables you choose to make bookable, not the size of the building. A pub with forty covers in the dining room and a bar that runs on walk-ins sets the dining room as its bookable capacity and leaves the bar alone. On the Business tier the visual floor plan manager goes further, letting you lay out the snug, the garden, and the restaurant end separately and assign each booking to a specific table.

Can we run Sunday sittings with different rules to the rest of the week?

Yes. Availability is configured per day and per time band, so Sunday can run as a set of timed sittings with its own capacity, turn time, and party-size limits while Tuesday runs as an open service. Staff can add date overrides from the admin dashboard for closures, private hires, and one-off services. On the Business tier you can also take a card deposit on large Sunday tables, which is where most of the exposure sits.

Does Seatly handle function rooms or letting bedrooms?

No. Seatly books tables. Group and private dining on the Business tier covers a large party or a sectioned-off area under its own slot rules, but it is not a room diary — there are no day rates, no hourly hire, and no bedroom availability. If letting two to four function rooms is a core part of your trade, Seatly handles the table side and you will still run the rooms elsewhere. It is on our roadmap if enough pubs ask for it, and we would rather tell you that now than sell around it.

Can guests pre-order their roast or pick from a set menu when they book?

Not today. Bookings carry free-text notes and, on Professional and above, customer profiles with dietary preferences, so the information can travel with the booking. What Seatly does not do is present your menu at the point of booking and collect a choice per guest. Pubs running pre-ordered set menus for large parties still collect those by phone or email.

No. Monthly rolling, cancel any time, and your booking and customer data are exportable on the way out. There is no set-up fee for founding members, no per-cover charge at any tier, and no minimum term to sit out if it turns out we are not the right fit for your pub.

Seatly for Food-Led Pubs

A pub booking system for pubs that serve food.

Sunday sittings that hold. Big tables that turn up. A queue the people at the bar can join themselves. Seatly is a flat-fee booking system that lives on your own website, under your own name, from £59 a month with no per-cover charges.

Around a 6-minute read.

Talk to the founder Calculate Your Savings

A pub is not a restaurant with a bar attached

Almost every booking system on the market is built for a room where everybody has a reservation. A food-led pub runs two trades through one door. Diners book. Drinkers turn up. Most weeks the second group is the one paying for the roof, and the booking system has nothing to say about them at all.

There is a number behind that. When Zonal and CGA by NIQ asked 5,000 British consumers about pubs in October 2025, 27% said they like to pre-book a table and 73% preferred to keep the visit spontaneous. Read it the wrong way and it says pubs do not need a booking system. Read it properly and it says the opposite: roughly three in four of the people coming through your door will never appear in a diary, so a system that only manages reservations is managing a quarter of your trade. The same survey found 55% of pub-goers would prefer newer service styles — booking, ordering or queuing from a phone — against 45% who still want to do it the traditional way.

That shows up in three specific ways. Your bookable capacity is the dining tables, not the building — a system that treats the whole pub as one number will either turn away bookings you could have taken or seat people where the regulars stand. Sunday is a different business from Tuesday, with sittings, longer turn times, and tables of twelve. And when the dining room is full at seven on a Saturday, the couple at the door are standing next to a bar. In a restaurant a forty-minute wait loses the cover. In a pub it sells two drinks, if anybody thinks to offer.

This page is written for food-led pubs and gastropubs — CGA by NIQ counted 11,231 of them in Britain in June 2025, and the BBPA's own tenant cost guide models the type at roughly 70% food to 30% drink. If your trade is wet-led or late-night, we say further down which platform we think actually serves you better, and it is not this one.

Sources: Zonal and CGA by NIQ, GO Technology: The new age of pub service, 5,000 British consumers surveyed October 2025. CGA by NIQ Outlet Index, sites at June 2025, via the AlixPartners Hospitality Market Monitor (Britain, not the UK). BBPA, Running a pub: a guide to costs for tied tenants and lessees, September 2023 — its 30:70 figures are illustrative cost models rather than an industry definition.

Built for the way a food-led pub runs

01. A queue the bar can actually use. On Professional and above, diners scan a QR code to add themselves to the walk-in queue, then get a text when their table is ready. Nobody hovers by the till, nobody loses their place, and the wait happens where you sell drinks. This is the feature pubs ask us about that restaurants never do.
02. Sunday on its own rules. Availability is set per day and per time band, so Sunday can run as timed sittings with its own capacity, turn time, and party-size limits while the rest of the week runs open. Staff add date overrides for closures, private hires, and one-off services from the dashboard.
03. The whole service on one screen. The front of house timeline on Professional and above lays every table out across the shift — who is seated, who is due, who is running late. Drag a booking to move it to another table or time. Bookings carry the guest's visit count, VIP tag, and dietary needs where those are known.
04. The snug, the garden, and the restaurant end. The visual floor plan manager on the Business tier lets you lay out every table individually and assign bookings to specific ones, which is the practical way to stop a garden booking eating the last inside table on a day the weather turns.
05. Big tables, with something behind them. Group and private dining bookings on the Business tier take their own slot rules, and you can secure a card deposit on large parties, private events, or prime-time slots through your own Stripe account. A table of fourteen on a Sunday is the one that hurts when it does not arrive.
06. Quiz night, live music, bottomless brunch. Ticketed events on the Business tier run a one-off night or a weekly series, take free RSVPs, deposits, or full pre-payment through your own Stripe account, and share by link or QR code. You see fill, revenue collected, and how views turned into bookings per event.
07. Your name over the door, and on the widget. The booking flow sits on your own website in your own colours and fonts. No marketplace listing, no other pubs surfaced next to your booking, no diner-facing Seatly app.^*

What Seatly does not do for a pub

Worth knowing before you spend an afternoon on a demo rather than after.

• Rooms for hire. Seatly books tables. Group and private dining on the Business tier covers a large party or a sectioned-off area under its own slot rules — it is not a room diary. No day rates, no hourly hire, no letting bedrooms. A fair number of small pubs run two to four rooms alongside the food, and if that is core to your trade, Seatly handles the table side and you will keep running the rooms wherever you run them now. It is on the roadmap if enough pubs ask for it. We would rather say that than sell around it.
• Menu pre-orders. Bookings carry free-text notes, and Professional and above adds customer profiles with dietary preferences, so the information travels with the booking. What we do not do is put your menu in front of the guest at the point of booking and collect a choice per head. Set menus for big parties are still a phone call or an email.
• Tills, tabs, and table ordering. Seatly is a booking platform, not an EPOS. It sits alongside whatever you already use behind the bar rather than replacing it.
• A consumer marketplace. There is no Seatly app for diners and no directory that sends you strangers. Every booking comes from your own website, your own social links, or your own Google listing. If you are currently buying discovery traffic from a platform and it is working, that is a real thing you would be giving up.

What it costs, and which tier

Flat monthly, no per-cover fees, monthly rolling, cancel any time. Which tier suits your pub is genuinely a question about your pub, so here is what is in each one rather than a recommendation you would be right to distrust.

Starter

£59

per month

Unlimited bookings on your own site, widget customisation, customer database, 200 text reminders a month. Enough for a pub that wants bookings off the phone and onto the website.

Professional

£89

per month

Adds the front of house timeline, customer profiles and internal notes, the walk-in queue with QR self-join and text-when-ready, the analytics dashboard, and 400 texts. The queue is the pub-shaped part.

Business

£129

per month

Adds the visual floor plan manager, group and private dining, deposits and pre-payments, ticketed events, the multi-location console for up to three sites, and 1,200 texts pooled across them.

The honest version: a pub whose problem is a full dining room and people waiting at the bar gets most of its value from the walk-in queue. A pub running quiz nights, big Sunday tables, and a garden it needs to lay out separately is the case for the floor plan and deposits. A pub that simply wants bookings to stop arriving by phone at half six is fine on Starter. None of those is more correct than the others, and you can move between them.

For comparison, and taken from what those vendors publish themselves: Access Collins Evo starts at £149 per site per month, and ResDiary's entry tier is £109 a month capped at 150 bookings, plus a £99 set-up fee (both verified 10/08/2026). Verify current pricing with any provider directly before you decide — ours included.

When another system is the better fit

Three cases where we would point you elsewhere without much argument:

• Wet-led and late-night pubs. DesignMyNight is built around exactly that audience — a consumer site people browse to plan a night out, with Collins behind it. If your bookings are large groups planning an evening rather than tables planning a meal, that marketplace is the thing you would be paying for, and we do not have one. Our Seatly vs DesignMyNight comparison sets out both sides.
• Pubs whose diary is mostly rooms. If most of what you sell is function-room hire, a weddings-and-events diary, or bedrooms, you need a room booking system with a table feature, not a table booking system with a room gap.
• Pubs already inside a bundle. If bookings came free with your EPOS or card terminal and it works, the saving on a separate subscription is smaller than it looks. Worth checking what the bundle actually costs you before moving anything.

Getting it live

01. Check what you are already tied into. If you are on a booking platform now, find the notice period before you cancel anything. Some run to ninety days.
02. Decide what is bookable. Usually the dining tables and not the bar. That one decision does most of the configuration work.
03. Paste one line of code into your website. An inline script tag on WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace Premium, and custom sites; an iframe URL on Wix and anything else that blocks third-party JavaScript. Either way it is white-labelled to your pub.
04. Set Sunday up properly before you set anything else up. It is the service that will show you whether the configuration is right, and the one where getting it wrong is most expensive.

We're onboarding our first cohort of UK independents one at a time. If you run a food-led pub and want a second opinion on whether any of this fits, get in touch and we will tell you straight.

Common questions

Do I need a booking system if most of my pub trade is walk-ins?: That depends on whether the walk-ins are the problem or the point. If your dining tables fill on the day and nobody waits long, a booking system mainly buys you the ability to plan a kitchen order. If people are being turned away at the door on a Saturday, or standing at the bar hoping something frees up, the walk-in queue on Professional and above is the part that pays — diners scan a QR code to join the queue themselves, drink while they wait, and get a text when the table is ready. In a pub the waiting area sells beer, which is not true anywhere else.
Can I take bookings for the restaurant side without booking out the whole pub?: Yes. Capacity is the tables you choose to make bookable, not the size of the building. A pub with forty covers in the dining room and a bar that runs on walk-ins sets the dining room as its bookable capacity and leaves the bar alone. On the Business tier the visual floor plan manager goes further, letting you lay out the snug, the garden, and the restaurant end separately and assign each booking to a specific table.
Can we run Sunday sittings with different rules to the rest of the week?: Yes. Availability is configured per day and per time band, so Sunday can run as timed sittings with its own capacity, turn time, and party-size limits while Tuesday runs open. Staff add date overrides from the dashboard for closures, private hires, and one-off services. On the Business tier you can also secure a card deposit on large Sunday tables, which is where most of the exposure sits.
Does Seatly handle function rooms or letting bedrooms?: No. Seatly books tables. Group and private dining on the Business tier covers a large party or a sectioned-off area under its own slot rules, but it is not a room diary — no day rates, no hourly hire, no bedroom availability. If letting two to four rooms is a core part of your trade, Seatly handles the table side and you will still run the rooms elsewhere. It is on our roadmap if enough pubs ask for it, and we would rather tell you now than after you have signed up.
Can guests pre-order their roast or pick from a set menu when they book?: Not today. Bookings carry free-text notes, and Professional and above adds customer profiles with dietary preferences, so the information can travel with the booking. What Seatly does not do is show your menu at the point of booking and collect a choice per guest. Pubs running pre-ordered set menus for large parties still collect those by phone or email.
Is there a contract?: No. Monthly rolling, cancel any time, and your booking and customer data are exportable on the way out. There is no set-up fee for founding members, no per-cover charge at any tier, and no minimum term to sit out if it turns out we are not the right fit for your pub.

Weighing up platforms rather than pubs? Our buyer's guide compares the UK booking systems against the same six criteria, and the comparison pages go head-to-head with whatever you are on now.

Not a pub? There are pages for independent UK restaurants , Indian restaurants , and Mediterranean and Turkish restaurants .

Tell us about your pub

How many covers, how busy Sunday gets, and what happens now when the dining room is full. That is usually enough for us to say whether Seatly helps or not.

Talk to the founder Calculate Your Savings

* A note on Seatly branding. Seatly branding is optional and entirely your choice. A single toggle in your admin Settings controls whether a small "Powered by Seatly" line appears on your booking widget AND in confirmation, reminder, and cancellation emails. When enabled, you receive a tier-matched discount on your subscription (£5/month on Starter, £10/month on Professional, £15/month on Business). The toggle defaults to ON for Starter accounts and OFF for Professional and Business — you can change it whenever you like.